| Artists'
Edition | June 2009 | |  | Welcome to our
first broadcast of the RedDot Artists' Edition. For the last six months
we've been publishing the RedDot to clients to great success - it has
helped us increase web traffic to the Xanadu site, visitors to the
gallery, and, most important, sales. There are some things we want to
say just to our artist friends, however - and so we are launching this
edition. You will continue to receive the bi-weekly collector's edition
as well as the monthly (for now) artists' edition.
Our
aim is to help us all work together to optimize our efforts to sell
more art and share your work with the right collectors. At Xanadu we
have long prided ourselves on a willingness to take risks with emerging
artists, and with the RedDot we hope to make the journey a little
easier by offering art-selling tips, professional gallery advice and
opportunities for you to sell your work to Xanadu collectors.
As
always, I am at your service if I can help you more effectively reach
your goals as professional artist.
J. Jason Horejs
Owner
Xanadu
Gallery
jason@xanadugallery.com
| | | | | | Call for Art | | Last week a
long-time client from North Scottsdale was in the gallery with an eye
toward finding something to fit on her black granite coffee table in
the living room of her contemporary home. This client is not the type
to buy something just because it will fit, she is a discerning
collector, but she has been looking for several years now and is ready
to find the right piece.
The right piece will be
sculptural and measure approximately 18-28" long, about 8-16" wide and
10-20" high. Please refer to the photos below to see the
textures and colors in the room.
If you have a piece
that might be the perfect fit please email me a low-res (less than 1
Mb) image at jason@xanadugallery.com
Please include title, dimensions, medium and price. | | |  | | |  | | |  | | |  | | | | |
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| I’ve
been a writer for most of my life, with more than 25 years of
experience as a journalist, creative writer, and marketing
communications professional. It was a random job for an artist, though,
that really got me started as professional freelancer. A friend of a
friend who was a multimedia conceptual artist needed help with the
essay portion of a grant he was applying for and I said I could do it.
I had written extensively about music and film, and though I was a fine
arts aficionado, I had scant experience writing about art. This turned
out to be more of a strength than a weakness. Free of stultifying
jargon or received knowledge on how visual art should be written about,
I simply brought my journalist-critic toolkit to the assignment. I went
to his studio and looked at his work, asked some basic questions about
it (e.g., what materials did you use; what were the themes that
motivated you), read some background material he gave me, and then
wrote the essay. Well, he got the grant and I found that I was
competent at a form of writing I actually enjoyed.
A Picture’s Worth a
Thousand Words (But Someone Has to Record Them)
Most
visual artists can talk freely and fluidly about their work: what
inspires them; their composition, materials, and technique; what
they’re trying to say. When they have to put these ideas in
print, though—which they inevitably must—they often
find themselves at a loss for words. Blocked. This can be especially
frustrating for an artist who has a firm grasp of exactly what his/her
work is about and what he/she wants to accomplish with it. The words
are there, but they’re on the tip of the tongue. Well, it
shouldn’t come as a surprise. Visual artists are generally
not writers and writing per can be alien to them, because it relies on
a far different mental palette. Writing, after all, originates in a
different part of the brain. Indeed, writers see the world differently
than visual artists, and, obviously, work with another set of tools.
However, the radical differences between these two modes of expression
may actually explain why they so often complement one another.
An Outside Perspective is
Essential
Every artist needs, at some
point, an external analysis of their work. Even if he/she is a skilled
writer, he/she is too close to the subject to treat it with anything
approaching objectivity. The problem is less that an artist will be
biased in his/her assessment of the work—of course
that’s inevitable—but that he/she will be unclear.
The artist intimately knows every single aspect of his/her work, which
often makes it difficult to focus on its most significant elements.
Steeped in so much information and personal/emotional investment in the
work, he/she may often find it hard to “cut to the
chase.”
Here’s How I Work
I
find nothing more gratifying than when an artist for whom
I’ve worked says to me some variation of the following: I can
understand my own work better now because of what you wrote about it.
It’s no accident. When I work with artists to craft
statements, bios, essays, and other promotional material, I use a
standard, simple approach that invariably leads to a positive outcome.
First
I ask the artist to note everything he/she wants to say in the written
piece. This is generally a matter of 10 or 15 minutes work. Ideally,
the artist would make a simple outline of the piece (but
that’s optional). The clearer the artist is up front about
exactly what he/she wants the piece to say, the less time the job will
take and the more certain it is that the artist will get exactly what
he/she wants.
As a guideline for the
artist’s notes, and as the basis for a subsequent interview,
I send the artist the following questions:
1.
Exactly what sort of piece will this be (bio/artist statement)?
2.
What is intent of this piece (what is it to be used for: Web site,
press kit, etc.). Essentially, what are you trying to accomplish with
it?
3. Where/to whom will it be sent (who do you want to
reach)?
4. What is the message you want to convey . . . What
do you want to say about your work (e.g., materials used,
influences/current inspirations, themes, overarching message, etc.)?
5.
What do you want to retain, if anything, from your old bio/artist
statement?
6. How heavily should autobiographical elements
play into the piece (i.e., are autobiographical elements key to your
work)?
Before the interview (which usually takes 30
- 40 minutes), I examine the artist’s work closely, whether
online or, if it he/she is local (for me that’s New York), at
his/her studio. Basically I just go through the above questions. As a
practiced interviewer, though, I always find that certain answers lead
to other questions, which help to shape the final piece.
The
final result is a piece that is customized and completely in
accordance with the artist’s work—the ideas, the
material, everything he/she considers important. Whatever the artist
wants to say about his/her work I can help say it better. I usually get
it right the first, although in some cases minimal edits are required.
Ultimately, every artist for whom I've worked
has been happy with the final product.
To
learn more about how Adam can create powerful written communications
for you that will advance your work, contact him at: adameisenstat@aol.com
or 917.282.8949. You can also learn more about his services at Xanadugallery.com.
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| | Web Optimization | | by
Carrie Horejs | |  Since
launching Xanadu Studios,
we have been focused on increasing our
traffic to our website. We believe the best leads come from people who
have visited our physical location and then visit our website at some
later time either because we’ve added them to our mailing
list, or they like our gallery—they remember our
name—and they Google us. However, we also occasionally sell
art to people who have never been to our physical gallery but happen
upon us on the internet. These sales are such fun and we hope
to increase the frequency with help from all of our studio
artists.
As you are probably very aware,
there’s a whole lot of art online. Appearing within
the first few pages of a search engine for any given search term takes
good content, and a good Google page rank. Content is what
the search engines crawl and read; it’s the information on a
site in the form of words. Page rank is a value scale from
1-10 Google assigns to websites. I like to think of it in
terms of real estate. A town may have two stores that sell
the same products, but the store with the better location is going to
get more traffic. Same goes for websites. Two sites
may have very similar content, but the one with the better page rank is
going to get more traffic.
Google
considers Yahoo and Amazon
a rank of 9. My personal favorite
website, allrecipes.com,
is ranked a 7. Overland Gallery,
a
well established gallery in Scottsdale is a rank 3. Xanadu
has moved from a 3 rank to a 5 rank in four months with our SEO
efforts.
We are continually working to
increase our rank. Hundreds of websites may have similar
content, but the highly ranked sites will be listed first among search
results. The rank is determined by several factors. One factor is how
long your site has been around. This is great for Xanadu
since we’ve had our website since 2001.
Another
important factor is how many other websites are linking to
yours. Links are especially valuable if the site from which
they come has a high page rank. That’s the part for
which we’re hard at work—getting other valuable art
related sites to link to us, which in turn will give us a higher
ranking. For example, if you type in “glass wall
plates” to the Google search engine, Xanadu shows up within
the first three pages (last I checked we were on the first
page). This did not happen by luck. We have
specifically worked toward this, and being a rank 5 beats out a lot of
other sites with similar content.
But,
page rank is by no means the end-all be-all of SEO. Content
is truly king. A website must contain relevant information
for which people are looking. That’s why some sites
with poor page rank still do great if they have useful relevant
content. This is where all of you artists come in.
Be
thorough in your art descriptions. Pretend
you’re somebody searching for art. What terms might
a collector use to find your work? Use broad terms like
landscape oil painting, as well as narrow terms like Camelback Mountain
Sunset in Phoenix. I encourage you to use the Google
AdWords
Keyword Tool to help you pick
popular search terms. You can actually see how many searches
are performed each month for any given search term.
In summary, we hope you’ll help us with
great content, and we promise to do our best in encouraging visitors to
our Scottsdale gallery to visit Xanadu Studios online as well as
continuing our efforts to increase our page rank.
Thanks
for trusting us to help you gain exposure for your incredible art!
Carrie
For
more information on
showing your work on xanadugallery.com, visit Xanadu
Studios.
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | Upcoming Marketing Workshops | | | | Xanadu
Owner, J. Jason Horejs presents an intensive, interactive workshop
teaching artists how to prepare their art, research galleries, and
successfully approach them for representation. | | | | Live Workshops | | Seattle,
WA | Saturday, June 13 | | Minneapolis,
MN | Saturday, June 20 | | more
information | | | | Online Workshops | | Wednesday,
June 17 | | Saturday,
June 27 | | more
information | | | | Cooperative Marketing Opportunity | |  Xanadu
is launching a new direct marketing campaign
and invites you to gain exposure for your work. Beginning the first
week of July and running through October we will be sending a bi-weekly
postcard mailing to our 500 best collectors. The objective of this
campaign will be to drive traffic to xanadugallery.com, to your website
and to generate sales. This is a great way to get your work in front of
qualified buyers inexpensively.
Participation will
be limited to artists selected by Jason, Carrie, and Xanadu director
Elaine, and will be on a first-come, first-served basis - a maximum of
eight participants.
Artist's participation in the
advertising will be $235 total. If you would like additional cards to
send to your mailing list you may purchase 100 cards for $29.99, or 250
for $64.99.
All you have to provide is a good
quality digital image. Xanadu will layout, produce and mail the cards.
Artwork need not be at Xanadu Gallery - postcards will direct
collectors to the website.
Participating artists
must be members of Xanadu
Studios. Please email jason@xanadugallery.com
and include the word "Postcard" in the subject line to request
participation. | | | | Website Design | | Are
you ready to update/redesign your website? Xanadu is pleased to
coordinate custom website design with professional webdesigners at
reasonable prices. Visit our webdesign
page for more information | |  |
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